Nonprofit ponies up $3 million to get those in crisis off...

1of2The sleeping quarters at the Hummingbird Navigation Center at the San Francisco General Hospital in San Francisco, Calif. Tuesday, August 29, 2017.Photo: Mason Trinca / Special to The Chronicle

2of2Daniel Lurie is founder and CEO of Tipping Point CommunityPhoto: Courtesy Daniel Lurie

Tipping Point Community, a San Francisco nonprofit tackling poverty, will donate up to $3 million to fund a new psychiatric respite facility in the city.

The news comes as city officials are scrambling to address the crisis of mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless people on San Francisco’s streets.

The funding, announced Thursday, will cover capital costs and 18 months of operational costs for the new facility. The respite center, which will have 15 beds for those in need of psychiatric services and treatment, will mirror an existing 29-bed facility on the San Francisco General Hospital campus, called Hummingbird Place. A provider has not yet been identified to run the facility.

No location has been specified for the new beds, but Daniel Lurie, CEO and founder of the charity, said it could be “close to downtown,” like in the Tenderloin or South of Market — neighborhoods where a majority of the city’s homeless services are already concentrated.

“This is an urgent need,” he said, adding that he hopes to pin down a site by January. “We want to move quickly, and the city wants to move quickly.”

While Mayor London Breed said the city needs to fix the existing problems that are leaving some of its current supply unused, she said it is also important to increase services at the same time.

“Our goal is to try to identify the problems and to fix them,” she said in an interview with The Chronicle outside City Hall. “It’s not as simple as what is being implied.”

She said Hummingbird Place is an “incredible” facility, and she is “proud of the work they do.”

As visits to the psychiatric unit at the public hospital have swelled, demand for respite centers like Hummingbird has also increased. The existing Hummingbird facility is filled nearly every day, the department said. The current facility mostly helps homeless people who are considering pursuing other voluntary treatment programs in the city.

Now that the funding for the new beds is secured, the city will have to find a location for the beds — a difficult task in San Francisco where homeless services in some neighborhoods are at times met with intense pushback. A proposal to build a homeless shelter on the Embarcadero set off a firestorm — and residents are now suing the city to stop it from being built.

Nigusse Bland’s report determined that 4,000 people in San Francisco are homeless, mentally ill and drug-addicted, and in need of care. The report determined that 95% of that population struggles with alcohol abuse. As a result of that finding, the city will also look into creating a “managed alcohol facility.”

“Now we have clear and accurate data,” Breed said. “We have a lot of work to do ahead of us to provide the behavioral health care that people need — and we need partnerships to do it.”

Trisha Thadani is a City Hall reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle. She previously covered work-based immigration and local startups for the paper’s business section.

Thadani graduated from Boston University with a degree in journalism. Before joining The Chronicle, she held internships at The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and was a Statehouse correspondent for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.